


Love In the Vein

by tomato_greens



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Depression, F/M, M/M, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-01
Updated: 2014-10-01
Packaged: 2018-02-19 10:58:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2385893
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tomato_greens/pseuds/tomato_greens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The body remembers.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love In the Vein

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to [tiltedsyllogism](http://tiltedsyllogism.tumblr.com) for running this challenge! Title yanked from the song in question, [Under African Skies](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ptBc9v5a2U).

The body remembers. This is the only thing John can think, afterwards: the body remembers.

 

_“What brings you here today, John?” Ella asks in greeting._

 

Routine, he’s found, is the best numbing agent. He wakes at seven on the nose and eventually learns to apportion fifteen extra minutes in order to stare at his ceiling, helpless, overwhelmed, awash in the great loneliness he now bears, before he manages to put his legs over the side of the bed and stand up. His hip twinges. He puts on his pants, buttons his shirt, secures his belt, tugs on his socks, his shoes. Coffee. A piece of toast. When he is feeling ambitious, an egg. 

On Thursdays, he goes to see Ella, a waste of time. Twice a month someone deposits five hundred pounds into his bank account. He assumes it is Mycroft. Damages rendered.

 

_“I can’t talk about it,” he says._

 

Mrs. Hudson comes down to the new flat for tea when she can, which isn’t as often as either of them would like. It’s easier for John to get around, and he’s got an emptier schedule besides, but the first time he’d knocked on 221A, he hadn’t been able to get a foot over the threshold. He had felt his body slow in profound, bone-deep refusal, and been powerless to stop it. 

The last time he had been in Mrs. Hudson’s flat, Sherlock had been with him. Now he was not. There was no way past it. He’d lifted his foot. He put it down again.

“I’ll get my coat,” Mrs. Hudson had offered, and leaned past the doorstep to kiss his cheeks. “God, it’s good to see you again, John.”

“You too,” he agreed. He felt something akin to embarrassment, separated from him by a thin layer of cotton wool––as though he should be embarrassed and couldn’t quite manage it. “Tea all right?”

Mrs. Hudson sent him a scathing look over her shoulder. “If we’re going out, I’ll expect something a tad stronger than tea, love.”

“As you like,” he said, and took her arm. 

They didn’t talk about it, not at first. Later, she touched his shoulder, lifts her glass of red––she’d been on her third, though John was still nursing his first pint, which had gone sour and strange on his tongue. She’d said, voice kind, “In memoriam.”

John took a deep breath. She patted his hand.

 

_“Why today?”_

 

The thing about living with Sherlock Holmes was that he was––an adventure; of course, he was an adventure, an adrenaline rush made flesh. But occasionally Sherlock wound down into himself, and for entire afternoons, he seemed to fit comfortably within the rangy confines of his own body. In ugly retrospect John realizes he misses those moments the most.

 

_“Do you want to hear me say it?” he snaps._

 

John wasn’t raised with religion. He doesn’t believe in fate or miracles. For a few years, he had believed in saviors. Now, sins.

 

_“What happened, John?”_

 

There’s one visceral moment of shock he keeps living over and over again. Objectively, it isn’t the worst part; that dubious honor belongs to the way his stomach had dropped away from him in total disbelief, how his hands had been covered in Sherlock’s blood, how Sherlock’s pulse had stayed silent and hideously still beneath John’s grasping fingers. He’d been looking up. His eyes had been open. He’d been looking up.  

 

_John opens his mouth. Nothing comes out._

 

He lives alone, a one-bedroom flat that probably would have been above his means if not for Mycroft’s monthly penance. He keeps it neat as a matter of habit, almost painfully so. It does not look like someone lives there.  He experiments: tries throwing dirty clothes on the floor rather than in the laundry basket, doesn’t get out of bed for a week, lives on coffee and tea for three days. He sings in the shower, loudly, very badly. But the truth of the matter is that he is not an eccentric genius and disorder does not come naturally to him and the apartment still looks like a sound stage, halfway removed from real life.

He tidies the clothes away and stops singing. No point in it. He cannot become a person he has never been.

 

_“You need to get it out,” Ella presses. Her voice is calm and deep––too gentle. “Say it now.”_

 

He tries to bring a woman called Gracie home with him. She’s got a turned-up nose and killer legs, really astonishing, and before he asks her back to his, he can picture his face framed by her thighs, how she’ll taste, how she’ll feel when he finally thrusts inside, the pink clutch of her around him.

She’s very kind when he––can’t. She strokes his temple with her thumb and kisses the tip of his ear, lets him keep two fingers warm inside her while she brings herself off. It’s fine. It should be fine. He turns her back when she gets dressed. It’s too late to be shy, but he cringes away from the vulnerable arch of her spine, her slatted ribs. She’s too thin, maybe. Maybe. He’s got his own ribs to slot his fingers against.  

“I’ll let myself out?” she asks. It isn’t rhetorical, but he can’t answer, just stays hunched over on the bed. He isn’t embarrassed. He isn’t anything. No; he is lonely. She runs her fingers along his shoulder as she passes him by. The door opens. The door shuts.

 

_John shakes his head._

 

John can’t remember the last time he slept in the same bed as someone else more than three nights in a row. Before Afghanistan. He rarely felt the absence.

They hadn’t done anything. One kiss, once. John had thought, maybe––but in the end, they hadn’t been anything. 

 

_“Sorry. I can’t,” he says. He stands to go._

 

It’s the second date. John thinks it’s going well.

“I lost someone. I can’t talk about it,” he admits.

“We all have things we can’t talk about,” Mary says, easy _._


End file.
